Die No Other Day

Years after losing its Will-pay-$8-for-it status, falling more recently from Maybe-if-it’s-on-discount-at-Blockbluster’s to Might-download-it-one-day, the James Bond franchise is now being downgraded to If-the-only-other-inflight-movie-has-got-Adam-Sandler-in-it status. Ranking any lower than that involves the use of torture or massive amounts of psychoactive substances as a mandatory condition for viewing.

Perennial intro sequence. Appears Bond… riding the wave… on. a. surfboard. Do I need to go through the foot-long list of why this is wrong on so many levels? I can only expect the next movie will see him shooting villains from his skateboard in between two half-pipes.

A few random series of explosions later, we get treated to, without a doubt, the worst massacre of a James Bond theme ever. Sung by a vocoder loosely assisted by Madonna’s flailing vocal cords, this song makes Tina Turner’s sub-Shirley Bassey performance a work of art by comparison.

By then, the average viewer already wants to take his eyes out with a dull spoon. Mind you the movie hasn’t even begun yet.

It is still unclear whether Madonna’s useless cameo, a few scenes later, was payment or retribution for her earlier vocal pummeling. Either way, she once again proves her uncanny ability to destroy celluloid and ruin scenes with a mere few seconds of her appearance on screen. I guess we should only be thankful the producers talked her out of doing the embarrassingly fake British accent she has instead been serving journalists ever since.

On the stilted acting front, the battle is fierce, Halle Berry wins, but only by a thin margin.

Concluding the paroxystic fight of your movie by any variation on the “die, bitch!” theme, uttered by the plucky hero/heroin, is OK. In the fucking 80’s.

Even accounting for mandatory Evil Genius’ Factor of Unexplainable Stupidity (e.g.: spending 3 hours explaining one’s evil plot instead of just shooting the hero), tell me exactly why would one ever name his Grand Evil Project after the most widely known tale of Rise and Fall in recorded History? Was “Project Miserable Failure” already taken?

The naming and oh-so-unexpected failure of the Project, along with its 3-mile wide blinking billboard of a metaphor, should give an idea as to the level of subtlety injected in the story altogether.

Another two or three episodes and the next movie in the franchise will be released as a mere adaptation of the eponymous videogame. Oh wait, it already is.

In other news, word is that the doomsday machine in next episode will be powered by the corpse of Ian Flemming, rotating at supersonic speed inside his grave.

You know, if I was to even get started on the horribly bad designs of half the sets (even the scenes set “on site” invariably bring to mind Austin Power’s quip about England bearing an uncanny ressemblance to southern California)… and the pathetic CGI… and pretty much everything else in that movie…

Thing is: James Bond is supposed to be a bit silly, and over the top and tacky… Just not “we just blew $20 million on this scene but couldn’t make it look any better than a Sci-Fi channel telefilm” tacky…

And I agree: Austin Powers is on its way to become more faithful to the original spirit… which is saying a lot…

S.W.,

Disdain?
It’s full blown seething hatred we’re talking about here. Directed at the people responsible for the repetitive onscreen gang-rape of my childhood for the sake of making an extra buck.

Jolly good post! It is the most hideous movie I have ever seen… I was particularly distubed by the surfboard, the massive space-based laser thing made out of diamonds, the ridiculous car chase across the ice, the ridiculous ice palace, the obvious studio-setting of the big sword figthing scene, not to mention the rest of the film… All in all a heap of junk.

Anyway, on a more positive note: thanks for giving us SK2, it’s superb! And I have to agree with your final comments on Fleming doing some supersonic spinning 😉